Duxbury Football Team Meets With Finegold About Anti-Semitism

ANDOVER, MA — State Sen. Barry Finegold, a Jewish former football player, met Saturday with the high school team that was using anti-Semitic play calls, he said in a news release.

Finegold wrote to the Duxbury High School football team Wednesday after it came out the team was using Jewish and Holocaust-related terms for line-of-scrimmage audible play calls, an incident that cost the team's successful coach his job.

Finegold asked the team to meet with him and said he saw the incident as a potential learning experience for the players.

The state senator played football at Andover High School and Franklin & Marshall College. An Andover resident, he represents Andover, Dracut, Lawrence and Tewksbury in the state senate.

When meeting with members of the team Saturday, Finegold spoke about Judaism, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, he said.

"There is a term in Judaism known as t'shuvah (תשובה‎), which means 'return' or 'repentance,'" Finegold said. "I sincerely hope we will move forward, and move forward stronger than before. I believe that we can use the incident in Duxbury as a crucial learning opportunity."

The Duxbury school district acknowledged last week that the team had "used highly offensive language on the field as part of a play-call system designed to make on-field adjustments" during a recent game against Plymouth North.

One of the calls was "Auschwitz," the name of a Nazi concentration camp in Poland where over a million people, including nearly one million Jews, were killed.

"I spoke to the students about the Holocaust," Finegold said. "This was not an easy discussion, but it was important. I showed how people like me were rounded up, sent to concentration camps, experimented on, and murdered. I showed images of children — the same age as my children — at Auschwitz. I played videos from survivors talking about their experiences."

Ahead of the meeting, Duxbury district officials said they were grateful for Finegold's offer. After the play calls became public, the team's head coach Dave Maimaron was fired and their game scheduled for Friday against Hingham was canceled.

"It is on all of us to fight for a better world," Finegold said. "We can all be messengers."